Artist Statement

In the summer of 1975, the NASA Ames Research Center teamed up with Stanford University on "Space settlements: A design study" to brainstorm what life in space would look like. Two painters from the Bay Area were recruited, Don Davis and Rick Guidice, to provide realistic, though futuristic, takes on human life inside a space colony.

Cylinder Endcap AC75-1883 1920 is the first cylindrical design we've featured from this series (our previous editions were of toroidal, or donut-shaped, colony designs). The painter's inspiration for nature curving into a coastal city is easy to pinpoint: Don Davis lived in the Bay Area at the time of the study. He hoped that this romantic depiction of life in space would entice everyday people into wanting an orbiting home.

Space settlements: A design study was just the beginning of any number of creative, forward-thinking, though slightly oddball, money-making tech projects to come out of the Bay Area over the decades. In the 1970s, the space industry believed the cosmos could be harnessed as a potential real estate hub (just as the tech industry today continues to mine the depths of the web for more and more online real estate).

Why We Love It

"Don Davis’ Cylinder Endcap AC75-1883 1920 is one of about 13 paintings made to illustrate what life might be like in NASA’s space settlement design project. Unlike the paintings of toroidal space colonies 20x200 has previously editioned, this release shows a large cylinder, with a landscape modeled on the view from Sausalito. The dizzying perspective and scale of this concave landscape, curving upward and around the viewer, was informed by Davis’ previous work creating geographically accurate views of other planets for NASA, and rendering giant fictional objects in space. In Davis’ image here, the viewpoint is in the pastoral countryside, with something like a small prefabricated dome-house on a hill by the stream. We are looking down into a city and a bay; beyond them, a vast window gives us a glimpse into a neighboring city in another cylinder spinning nearby" ... Read more from Fred Scharmen on the blog!

Our quoted dimensions are for the size of paper containing the images, not the printed image itself. We do not alter the aspect ratio, nor do we crop or resize the artists’ originals. All of our prints have a minimum border of .5 inches to allow for framing.

Share

Space Editions

We're
unabashedly
into
outer space:
romantic
notions
of
the
great
unknown,
iconic
and
uplifting
moments
in
history,
how
it
shapes
our
vision
of
the
future.
These
editions
are
the
intersection
of
art
and
science,
and
it's
a
sight
for
sore
eyes.
Blast
off
into
our
curated
collection
of
images
from
the
NASA
archive.